De-indexed homepage in Google - very confusing.
-
A website I provide content for has just suffered a de-indexed homepage in Google (not in any of the other search engines) - all the other pages remained indexed as usual. Client asked me what might be the problem and I just couldn't figure it out - no linkbuilding has ever been carried out so clean backlink profile, etc. I just resubmitted it and it's back in its usual place, and has maintained the rankings (and PR) it had before it disappeared a few days ago. I checked WMT and no warnings or issues there. Any idea why this might've happened?
-
Having disappeared, the homepage appeared immediately when I resubmitted it, then fell back in SERPs a little and is now achieving better SERPs than when it disappeared. I can't see any probs with the code / sitemap or anything. All in all rather confusing but (thankfully) resolved in a couple of minutes. Thanks for your brilliant feedback Thomas and for your help as well Marcus. Thanks to you, I'm well prepared should this problem hit one of my clients again
-
Hi Marcus,
That is great news to have. Not that it's great that it happened but Great that other people have seen this happen and recovered. Considering all the things going on right now I would say at a glitch is entirely possible.
I know Google makes a change to the page rank algorithm approximately every 3 months and weird things happen. Plus if you count the way people actually charge their page rank it's normally with some bar that's out of date.
Here, it is what I found it appears to be extremely common with no issues that would actually affect you like your SERPS rank for certain keywords.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/ffzgDbpHh14
http://www.search9.co.uk/why-has-my-pagerank-disappeared
http://www.webworkshop.net/google_faq.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4550136-3-30.
http://www.zemanta.com/blog/find-google-algorithm-updates-make-website-search-rank-drop/
Marcus very valuable contribution thank you.
a change to the page rank algorithm approximately every 3 months and weird things happen. Plus if you count the way people actually charge their page rank it's normally with some bar that's out of date.
Here, it is what I found it appears to be extremely common with no issues that would actually affect you like your SERPS rank for certain keywords.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/ffzgDbpHh14
http://www.search9.co.uk/why-has-my-pagerank-disappeared
http://www.webworkshop.net/google_faq.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4550136-3-30.
http://www.zemanta.com/blog/find-google-algorithm-updates-make-website-search-rank-drop/
the 3rd link down just like Marcus explained has a very similar story. I think very valuable contribution thank you Marcus your comment inspired me to look for more data.
All the best I hope this is of help,
Thomas -
Hey, Thomas's response really nails most of the obvious causes here but as a simple n=1 oppinion this happened to one of my clients last week. Homepage disappeared for around 48 hours. No problems I could detect, but it was not indexed. Weird, but just as I was scratching my chin it popped back up.
Check the obvious things, make sure there are no problems and then leave it for 48 hours and see if it pops back up.
Not hugely scientific but after such a big update we often see little aberrations and this could be one of those if everything else is as it should be.
Hope that helps
Marcus -
I have heard a lot of people complain about page rank loss during the recent Penguin 2 update. Unfortunately that could be just Google's way of changing their own page rank. if the page itself is unaffected rank wise I would not be worried. The other thing I would what your client know is those page rank toolbars are notoriously wrong so you might want to check it through a more powerful or trustworthy source. I don't really put a lot of stock in Google's page rank because they frankly have told us not to and I would look more at the Moz rank
if there is a problem with the robots.txt it would be very possible Google is slow to reinstate it after what happened.
I would still check site with everything below however this is something I've heard of already from 2 other people. So it could just be a glitch or Google has made changes to its page rank algorithm.
It sounds to me as if there's either a problem with the robots.txt
or it's a simple matter of the plug-in or whatever's being used saying not to index or follow the homepage
if you could use this tool and simply type in the URL plus robots.txt
like this below
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/
then post the results or send me a private message with them included.
In addition go on the homepage and search with either control F if you're a PC user or command F if you are Mac user for nofollow and noindex
if you find either one of these
they will look like this
http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
<title>...</title> you can use the
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/
to change them to make sure they're not on the page. You do not need them there as Google default indexes and follows every page unless you tell it not to. The other thing you have to look for use of the X tag as well it can do the same thing as shown below
Example uses of the X-Robots-Tag
If you want to prevent search engines from showing files you’ve generated with PHP, add the following in the header file:
|
1
|header("X-Robots-Tag: noindex", true);
|This would not prevent search engines from following the links on those pages, if you want to do that, do the following:
|
1
|header("X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow", true);
|But doing it in PHP is probably not the easiest use for this kind of thing. I myself greatly prefer setting headers in Apache, when possible. Consider, for instance, preventing search engines from caching / showing a preview for all .doc files on your domain, you would only have to do the following:
take a look at this to know if you are pages being affected by one or the other.
http://yoast.com/x-robots-tag-play/#examples
I hope this is of help,
let me know if I can be of more assistance.
Thomas
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Do I Optimize with Google's Video Search?
Hi everyone, I am looking here https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/schema and I don't fully understand. Could someone please explain, step by step, what I have to do to optimize for Google video search? I.e. Step 1 do this Step 2 do this. I don't fully understand Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Website dance on Google Map results and organic seo results
My website is daily showing different position on maps.google.com and for the last few days like yesterday it was on 21st position on some keyword and today it is no where and same with other keywords. Is this a Google Dance ?? what can be its period ? and what is tyhe solution to handle it ??
Algorithm Updates | | mnkpso0 -
Organic Search Result in google
Hello! Actually, I would like to know the major check points which decides the organic search result[Google]. I see many of the sites in first page which are not even having good level of page and domain authority. I am a beginner but i have done all the score card checkpoints and issue free pages 🙂 Some where i dropped on organic search result. Ex Keyword : blikkenslager Targeted page : http://www.nortekk.no/vi-utforer/blikkenslager-15/ Search Engine : Google.no [norsk (nynorsk)] Thank you for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | Webworld_Norway0 -
Google is forcing a 301 by truncating our URLs
Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
Algorithm Updates | | mmac
http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful. We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs. These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week. I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week. Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
Michael0 -
Google Panda - large domain benefits
Hi, A bit of a general question, but has anyone noticed a improvement in rankings for large domains - ie well known, large sites such as Tesco, Amazon? From what I've seen, the latest Panda update seems to favour the larger sites, as opposed to smaller, niche sites. Just wondered if anyone else has noticed this too?Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
Has Google lost its mind? I am the only link in every SERP for a query?
I run a small online debutante dress store and have been doing some onsite seo recently. Anyways, when I search for the search query "deb dress style guide" my site is the only search result for the first three pages of Google Australia (my target market). Just endless links to my site. I have competitors in my niche who all have websites worthy of listing in the SERP as shown when you google "deb dresses". Can anyone explain whats going on?
Algorithm Updates | | mydebdress20 -
Decent rankings in Google, nothing in Bing and Yahoo
Hi there, I'm in the process of SEOing a site in a very competitive sector, the short term loans market. The URL for the site is http://www.piggy-bank.co.uk. I've managed to get a fair bit of success in Google for some very competitive keywords like short term loans, short term lender etc but in Bing and Yahoo I'm having no luck at all, with only 2 visits in the past month and no decent rankings!! I think I'm doing everything right, with regular new content on the site, decent technical SEO, semantic site structure, regular site map upload, a 10 year old domain, holistic link building through guest blogging etc, but still no luck at all. Looking at the webmaster tools in Bing, 95% of the URLs are indexed, but I'm getting such a low impression count, and obviously, an even lower click through. Am I missing something really obvious? Does anyone have any suggestions to improve my Bing and Yahoo rankings? I've worked on 100s of other sites and Yahoo and Bing tend to be the easy win to make the client happy 😉 Thanks in advance for your help. Dan
Algorithm Updates | | djslimited1 -
Can visitors duration time affect Google Rankings?
Does the time a person stays on a website affect Search Rankings? If so, could the lower time from Adwords Visitors be effecting organic rankings? And the same for bounce rate. If Non-Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration time is 3:55 and Paid Search Traffic Avg. Visit Duration is 1:59 Could the low duration time be affecting our website rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | hfranz0